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Chaos theory (or chaology [1]) is an interdisciplinary area of scientific study and branch of mathematics. It focuses on underlying patterns and deterministic laws of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. These were once thought to have completely random states of disorder and irregularities. [2]
Ralph Douglas Stacey (October 1948 – September 4 2021) was a British organizational theorist and Professor of Management at Hertfordshire Business School, University of Hertfordshire, in the UK and one of the pioneers of enquiring into the implications of the natural sciences of complexity for understanding human organisations and their management.
The nature of chaos theory suggests that the predictability of any system is limited because it is impossible to know all of the minutiae of a system at the present time. In principle, the deterministic systems that chaos theory attempts to analyze can be predicted, but uncertainty in a forecast increases exponentially with elapsed time. [2]
In social theory, the concept of self-referentiality has been introduced as a sociological application of self-organization theory by Niklas Luhmann (1984). For Luhmann the elements of a social system are self-producing communications, i.e. a communication produces further communications and hence a social system can reproduce itself as long as ...
In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The term is closely associated with the work of the mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz.
Butterfly effect image. The butterfly effect describes a phenomenon in chaos theory whereby a minor change in circumstances can cause a large change in outcome. The scientific concept is attributed to Edward Lorenz, a mathematician and meteorologist who used the metaphor to describe his research findings related to chaos theory and weather prediction, [1] [2] initially in a 1972 paper titled ...
In lab experiments that study chaos theory, approaches designed to control chaos are based on certain observed system behaviors. Any chaotic attractor contains an infinite number of unstable, periodic orbits. Chaotic dynamics, then, consists of a motion where the system state moves in the neighborhood of one of these orbits for a while, then ...
Even though the idea of the edge of chaos is an abstract one, it has many applications in such fields as ecology, [3] business management, [4] psychology, [5] political science, and other domains of the social sciences. Physicists have shown that adaptation to the edge of chaos occurs in almost all systems with feedback. [6]